TALES OF VEGETABLE BEINGS

Tales of Plant Beings is an ongoing research project that explores human-plant entanglements: the many ways humans influence plants and the ways those plants in turn influence humans. The title, inspired by a book by Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder, at once refers to plants as beings themselves and the many ways of being together with plants. The research was primarily comprised of a series of interviews and field trips near two national parks with significant flora—Wollemi National Park in the Blue Mountains of Australia and Les Calanques National Park in the South of France. I spoke with people whose work and lives are deeply entangled with plants, scientists, farmers, park rangers, conservationists and gardeners, etc., about their relationships with different vegetable species.

This project was primarily a research one, feeding many future works through underground currents. However, the conversations were also edited into short texts and audio collages that trace common themes across the conversations. Together they reveal the many rich, complicated exchanges happening between the human and vegetable realm, resisting an easy sense of plants as a stable natural background, and pointing instead to the potential that emerges when we tend thoughtfully to the plants we share the world with.